The real problem with using any blogging platform for technical documentation is that of re-use, even if you categorize and tag your posts and pages. I think you may be able to overcome this, however, by trying the following:

First, consider all posts topics. Posts are your reusable chunks that can appear in any context. Tag them with all the relevant tags, but only give them one category. Tags should be granular [Installing, administration, etc.], and categories, broad [Product A, Feature X].

Second, think of pages – or a set of subpages – as your publication targets. On each page, then, you could include titles and excerpts from the appropriate posts/topics.

Page 1, which is an overview, includes:
topic 1.1
topic 2.1
topic 3.1

Page 2, which is the complete guide, includes:
topic 1.1
topic 1.2
topic 1.3
topic 2.1
topic 2.2
topic 3.1
topic 3.2
topic 3.3

You could probably also do the same thing with the custom menus in WordPress 3.0.

Just a brainstorm really, but the point is that you probably could create indexes of structured TOCs this way if you think of posts as the reusable topic chunks of your project.

As far as hierarchy, I agree that that’s important. What about creating a Table of Contents page that lists all the important categories in an outline format, so you can easily see what falls under what? It doesn’t put the posts themselves in order, but at least gives some framework for organizing info. You could also mess with the ordering to put a particular post for each category (the basics of that category perhaps) at the top.

Footnotes have fallen out of favor on the Internet, but they still have an important role to play. If you have checked Wikipedia recently, you will know the reason. Many external links which were added are now dead. Sometimes, valuable information is available online in an offline source like a book or print newspaper. Wikipedia made a decision a few years ago to require that the main text body of their articles link to footnotes at the bottom. The footnotes themselves would contain the hyperlinks to the third party sources.

That is generally a good practice. First, it allows the page citing the source to include bibliographic information in an unobtrusive manner on the bottom of the page. Second, it gives the reader more clues for finding the original source if the third party source has gone offline or if the URL has changed. Sometimes, when the URL has changed on a third party link, if you know the title or some identifying keywords, it can be relatively easy to find the new line if it is still online. Sometimes it is just helpful to keep information about the source on the same page for the reader’s convenience.

While HTML has made it easy to create links to external sources, making footnotes is clumsy and time-consuming (even for people relatively comfortable with HTML). Perhaps the concept of the footnote does not translate well to the browser page; nonetheless,a CMS that automates the use of anchors can simplify the process somewhat of creating and maintaining footnotes.

On a practicle note; i read these posts via an RSS feed in Outlook. When you click the little footnotes you are directed to the top of the page, not to the bottom where the actual links are posted.

http://dotnet.blogengine.net/ doesn’t work

http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/ does.

bother.

Tagging and categorizing are such intuitive tasks to complete when I’m writing a blog post–I would love to have that ease when I’m writing a help topic. Perhaps having subcategories would be sufficient structure to establish relationships.

I could see writing this way, with a standard, though evolving, set of available tags and categories to keep things consistent.

I’m not digging the footnotes, either. I’m interested in trying it out for at least a while, though. It’s a web habit of mine to click and explore as a I read. Often I open the links in new windows and look at them later. The footnote still stops my eye, and then I want to scroll to it. I didn’t scroll, though, because I read about what you are trying to achieve.

In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug talks about following established web conventions, and that if you don’t, the benefits of the deviation should outweigh the cognitive dissonance it produces. I wonder which will win in the case of links vs. footnotes.

I’m not, thanks for asking. From an aesthetic point of view, I find them far more distracting than hypertext links. But I suspect that’s just my personal taste. From a practical point of view, why make me click twice (first to get to the bottom of this page, then again to follow the link) when I used to click just once?

Anent this post: I like where you’re taking us. Looking forward to number 17.